The Acute withdrawal lasted about a month and a half and the paws seemed to be pretty light for me... dont get me wrong I had them but I was really putting allot of effort into managing them.. I radically changed the way I thought about life, I threw all the guilt and shame out the window for good, I identified the roots of my addiction and worked on and solved as many pieces as I could identify, I used testosterone replacement therapy as a testosterone check on me indicated that I was WAY below normal levels. I keep moving through the acutes and started to exercise during the paws, I used techniques to limit my negative emotions, such as mindfulness and keeping all my thoughts firmly in today as if we slip into yesterday we can get hit with guilt, shame, anger, resentment, and if we slip into tomorrow we can get hit with fear, anxiety, hopelessness, stress.. etc.
It is clearly documented that addicts develop an unusually strong "A dysfunctional Emotional response." Emotions for humans are the evolutionary way unconscious has developed to influence and manipulate the conscious into doing what it wants done. If we use a drug to try and quite an emotion or one whose side effect is a decrease in them, and pain can be looked at as a localized emotion, then the brain ramps up the power of its emotions to try and compensate for the addition of the drugs. The brain likes its homeostasis and it does things like tolerance, and the heightening of emotions to try and return the brain to where it naturally is. So the idea of "opioid induced Hyperalgesia" Makes total sense to me.. Because if my thoughts on the brain ramping up its emotional response combine with the undeniable aspect of tolerance.. then as the brain wramps up the pain and decreases the effectiveness of the pain medication through tolerance then this would could increase the pain. There is another way of possible explaining this as well.. the portion of our brains that is addicted is also the same place that causes the sensation of pain. In fact all the symptoms of acute and post acute withdrawal are centered right in the hypothalamus.. and it may be possible that the limbic system is able to identify that by increasing the pain it is able to get us to take more of the substance it is obsessed with.
It could be that the acute withdrawal are the period it takes for the brain to adjust back to it homeostasis with out the drug in the equation and then the Paws is a mix of a few things. One we have logged all kinds unsolved problems that are tagged with and emotion, as solved. We need to go back into the system and clean it out.. for the mix of a bunch of emotional problems that are unsolved combined with a painfully high emotional response is a terrible mix to have to deal with. So it is important to find away to clean the system.. one approach that works well for people are portions of the stepes from the fellowships. Its a confession and the power of telling someone else your problems and secretes is so powerful that it has been attributed to god for thousands of years. I dont want to get into a debate about the fellowships or god in your thread as thats not it purpose. But it may also just be a way we have evolved, because people who felt good about sharing their problems were probably more successful in life the more people the better for working on a problem. The making amends to the people we have harmed has a bunch advantages, the first one is it helps clean out all the negative emotions associated with those events and it may help rebuild relationships.
There a diffrent ways of dealing with this issue, but this is one of the most popular techniques.
The 12 Steps of Narcotics Anonymous
Alternate version of the twelve steps
There is a huge silver lining to the hugely strong emotions.. once you learn how to manipulate them through techniques that limit the negative emotions and promote the positive ones then people can experience utterly amazing positive emotions as well
Here are some threads that are good at promoting positive emotions..
Today I Am Thankful For... Ver. 3: Earth, Wind and Fire!
Share something POSITIVE from your day!
so when ever we get all miserable it pays to stop and switch how we are choosing to percieve what is going on at that moment.
The Paws can apparently last up to two years.. but this is a really extreme case. When my opiate receptors finally shut down a week before the fifth month the symptoms which had been getting a tiny bit better everyday disappeared. The pain specialist I talked to gave a timeframe of seven and a half months as when he thought most peoples shut down.. I think this is just an average as people seem to kinda get better at different rates and things like exercise, healthy natural sleep, exercising many different facets of the brain, and nutrition may play a really positive role in promoting healing. So anyway like I said just before month five I all the sudden got really tired and slept for twelve hours a night for three days after only sleeping 4 hours a night for almost five months. when I woke up all my symptoms had disappeared basically.. the pain was gone, the goosebumps that had sailed a demented path all over body were gone, and my mind became so clear it was amazing.. I had no idea what a fog i was in as I thought I was pretty clear headed after the acutes passed.. man I was wrong. It was like going from a beat up old four cylinder car to a V8 and then it got even better over the next six months.
So it good to have a plan in place to deal with the Paws and I hope some of this helps you out.
PS. If you want to share what disease you are struggling with you may get some good responses about that as well.
